One of the objectives of the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults was to introduce the history and mythology of Iran to children and adolescents in order to enhance their knowledge of Iran and foster their interest in the components of national identity. To this end, at the beginning of the Institute’s activities, a number of prominent writers and illustrators were recruited, and the production of specialized books for children and adolescents was entrusted to them. Taking Iranian national identity as its key concept, the present article examines two important works among the earliest illustrated books published by the Institute that addressed national and mythological themes: Jamshid Shah, written by Mehrdad Bahar, and Arash the Archer, written by Siavash Kasraei, both illustrated by Farshid Mesghali. The study of how national identity is represented in the illustrations of the mythological narratives of these two books is grounded in Roland Barthes’s semiotics. Using a descriptive and comparative method, the study addresses two questions: How do the illustrations of the two mythological books, Jamshid Shah and Arash the Archer, represent national identity, and how do the similarities and differences in the semantic systems of the illustrations of these two books lead to the formation of two distinct modes of representing national identity? One of the findings of the study concerns the influence of the texts on how the stories are visually represented. In other words, despite the difference between the two key figures of the narratives (one a king and the other a popular hero) the virtuous and nationally oriented nature of their conduct directs the overall visual representation of both books toward the representation of national identity. Accordingly, in the illustrations of these two books, the differences in the models and responsibilities of their two key characters are manifested through distinct visual languages and semantic systems, giving rise to two distinct modes of representing national identity, while the two works ultimately converge at the level of myth and the representation of national identity.